Long-Awaited Bikeshare Program Rolling into NYC Any Day Now

First they told us that the pilot project would launch this summer, but that optimism was tempered last month when the city promised it would at least pick an operator for its forthcoming bike-share system by the end of the season—a delay all the more humiliating because it allowed Long Beach, Long Island to launch the state’s first bike-share system. And now, with fall at our collective doorstep, it seems the final decision is imminent. Really.

So imminent, in fact, that it could happen this week. Or not. The Timesreports that on Friday the Department of Transportation held joint hearings on the forthcoming bike-share system with politicians and community leaders “after weeks of increasingly heated discussions over whether the administration had wrongly excluded the [City] Council from the planning stage of the project.”

The concession on the DOT’s part should clear the bike-advocating agency led by Janette Sadik-Khan to make its final decision regarding which firm should operate the city’s bike-share system known “as early as [this] week.”

The full 10,000 bicycle network isn’t expected to be up and running until spring/summer of 2012, but given that a trial roll-out was expected for this fall, when exactly we’ll start to see bike-share stations in Manhattan (not to mention Brooklyn) is anybody’s guess.